New York City Democrats embrace full speed reverse on education reforms

It was just a primary — and the results aren’t even final yet, with mail-in ballots still being counted to determine if there will be a runoff.

But advocates for traditional public education are jubilant that Bill de Blasio came out on top Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral race in New York City after a campaign in which he promised to yank support from charter schools, scale back high-stakes standardized testing and tax the wealthy to pay for universal preschool and more arts education.

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De Blasio’s education platform boiled down, in effect, to a pledge to dismantle the policies that Mayor Michael Bloomberg enacted over the past decade in the nation’s largest school district.

Those policies, emphasizing the need to inject more free-market competition into public education and weaken the power of teachers unions, are not unique to New York City; they’re the backbone of a national education reform movement that has won broad bipartisan support. Yet the reform movement has also triggered a backlash from parents and teachers who see it as a threat to their schools, their jobs and the traditional concept of public education as a public trust.

For those activists, de Blasio’s victory – coming on top of a handful of other recent wins for their side – is a sign the tide might slowly be turning.

“De Blasio defined himself as the anti-Bloomberg, especially on education – anti-testing, anti-privatization and focused on listening to parents and improving classroom conditions,” said Leonie Haimson, a parent activist and executive director of the organization Class Size Matters.

His win suggests that the national reform movement has “grown stale and unpopular,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian who has emerged as a leader of the opposition. “The voters of New York City have had enough.”

There were, of course, many other issues animating the mayoral primary. De Blasio, who now works as the city’s public advocate, consistently took the most liberal positions in the primary field of seven, decrying the vast gap between rich and poor in New York and promising to end the Bloomberg-era policing policy of “stop and frisk,” which he said too often targeted black and Hispanic youth.

But exit polls showed that education was a key issue for voters, and de Blasio made it a central plank of his campaign. He pledged, for instance, to maintain a cap limiting the number of charter schools and to stop providing rent-free space in city buildings for charters, which are publicly funded but generally privately run. De Blasio even directly attacked one of the city’s most successful and well-financed charter operators, Eva Moskowitz, who runs a network called Success Academies.

Moskowitz responded to de Blasio’s victory with disappointment. “New York City’s families need a leader who will represent all of their interests,” she told POLITICO, noting that charter schools are so popular in the city, thousands of families are on waiting lists.

Several national and regional polls in recent weeks have shown that Americans do support charter schools and also back other aspects of the education reform movement, such as high-stakes standardized testing.

At the ballot box, however, the reform movement has taken some hits. In Indiana last fall, voters rejected state schools chief Tony Bennett, a national symbol of reform; he lost despite a huge financial advantage over his opponent. Also last November, voters in Idaho rejected a reform package put forth by their schools chief and opposed by the teachers union.

And on Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn., three challengers intent on overhauling that city’s controversial reform strategy handily won the Democratic primary for school board, beating a slate backed by the powerful Democratic establishment.

Jeffrey Henig, a political science professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said voters in New York were fed up with both the substance of Bloomberg’s education policies and with the mayor’s sometimes imperious style, and they flocked to de Blasio because he promised change in both regards. The de Blasio victory reminded him, he said, of the voter revolt that turned D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty out of office in 2010 after he imposed controversial reforms on the city’s schools.

Taken together, the Fenty loss and the de Blasio win should “give pause to those who have barreled ahead with a ‘damn the torpedoes’ attitude” toward overhauling schools before building consensus, Henig said.

Analysts also pointed to the results Tuesday as a further sign of the diminished clout of New York City’s teachers union, which had backed former city comptroller Bill Thompson and campaigned vigorously for him. Thompson came in second in the primary. He could still force a runoff, depending on results from the absentee ballots. But exit polls show that de Blasio would easily defeat him.

The United Federation of Teachers “will now approach the 30-year mark since it had significant mojo in a New York City mayoral election,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. His group does not support either Thompson or de Blasio and will likely stay on the sidelines in the general election in New York, Williams said.

UFT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Conservatives, meanwhile, cautioned Democrats against assuming de Blasio will cruise to victory in November if he does secure the nomination. Democrats have a big edge in voter registration in New York City, but de Blasio’s pledges to impose new taxes on the wealthy and overhaul policing strategies may not go over well with all of them.

“It’s not over until the fat lady sings,” said Michael Petrilli, an education analyst at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “And the fat lady, in this case, is [Republican nominee] Joe Lhota.”